Jeff Topham on Liberia ’77 and healing a war-torn nation

Director Jeff Topham (pictured) discusses the making of his doc Liberia '77, which premiered on TVO in Canada this week, reflecting that "if I'd have known how hard that was going to be, I'm not sure I would have got so involved in the project."

Jeff Topham’s feature documentary Liberia ’77, which premiered on TVO in Canada this week, started with a box full of his father’s photos of Liberia in the 1970s, when he and his brother Andrew were little boys and his family were Canadian ex-pats in west Africa.

“Liberia was a place I always wanted to go back to since being a kid. But during the 1980s and 1990s, it was just not a place to go,” says Topham (pictured above) of the country’s long-running, ruinous civil war.

By 2010, peace was restored to Liberia after two outbreaks of civil conflict. So Topham, accompanied by his brother and documentary producer Melanie Wood, returned to the country of his childhood to re-shoot their father’s by-gone era photos.

Where to start their journey? “I didn’t know what to expect. I expected that something would happen,” Topham recalls.

While first pitching the documentary to TVO, they decided the film’s deus ex machina would be to tell Liberia’s story by explaining what happened to their 1970s housekeeper, James, who cared for them as kids as they played in paradise, along endless beaches, or in the thick jungle, and even with a pet chimp.

But when Topham and his team landed in Monrovia, they discovered not only was their former housekeeper nowhere to be found, but so too were photos of pre-war Liberia.

People they met as they searched for James the housekeeper had no photographic record of their own lives after it had been destroyed during the civil war.

In time, the Topham brothers discover James the housekeeper was no longer alive, but they did find his family, and especially his son, Jefferson, whom they emotionally befriend. But suddenly, an initial hope of the documentary to re-shoot their tattered 1970s family photos took on immediate urgency.

And it didn’t stop there. The dispassionate focus of Topham’s camera vanished as he and his brother struggled to come to terms with what became of people that his family had known in the 1970s, just before civil war ruined the nation.

“If I’d have know how hard that was going to be, I’m not sure I would have go so involved in the project,” Topham explains. So much for his original film idea about taking photos in Liberia.

“I wasn’t to be the main focus of the film, and I didn’t want to be the main focus,” he insists. All that changed when they met up with Jefferson, the son of James the housekeeper, and felt a responsibility for his well-being and that of his family.

The emotional force of confronting post-war Liberia well after the paradise of their youth had disappeared became even more stark when Topham watched endless footage of himself weeping while he and his brother talked to a stoic Jefferson and fellow Liberians about their war-time experiences.

In the end, Topham had to focus on his role as a director, not pulling back or turning off the camera as he got emotional while capturing footage for Liberia ’77, or when assembling the film in the edit suite.

“As a filmmaker, it was difficult knowing the best parts of the tape are the hardest parts of this character, which was actually me,” Topham recalls.

“I thank Melanie [Wood] for allowing me to walk that line,” he adds. If anything, watching himself endlessly tearful was key to Topham finding the threads of his film in the edit suite.

“If you watch a scene the one time, you have the one reaction to those situations, and you might not have an understanding of what’s going on,” the director explains. But as he watched the same scenes many times over, Topham developed more of a sense for why he and others around him reacted as they did.

“I watched how my brother dealt with things, and how villagers dealt,” he adds, noting how the luxury of instant replay in the edit suite changes how he sees a scene, distinct from when he first experienced it.

Now that the documentary Liberia ’77 is completed, having aired on TVO this week after a run on the festival circuit, the filmmakers are preparing to hold a photo exhibition in Monrovia, “Liberia at the National Museum,” this fall.

The aim is to showcase rare images of a peaceful and prosperous Liberia, before its civil wars, so a nation’s population gets a better sense of where they have come from, and a chance at a brighter future.

“There’s close to 2,000 photos and to take a collection back and put on a show and screen the doc there as well, that’s really something to look forward to,” says Topham.

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About The Author

Daniele Alcinii is a news editor at realscreen, the leading international publisher of non-fiction film and television industry news and content. He joined the RS team in 2015 with experience in journalism following a stint out west with Sun Media in Edmonton's Capital Region, and with communications work in Melbourne, Australia and Toronto. You can follow him on Twitter at @danielealcinii.